Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You can find episodes and more at... thinklikeagamedesigner.com. Today's episode is a special one. It's the first time I've ever brought on a repeat guest, and that repeat guest is one of the most illustrious in the game industry.
This is Richard Garfield, and he is back to talk about our mutual project that is launching on Kickstarter right now, September 7th, 2021, called SoulForge Fusion. And it is the world's first hybrid deck game. We've used new technology to digitally algorithmically print half decks that you can combine in ways that have never been done before using some of the best parts of the soul forge digital trading card game that we made.
all a decade ago we first started working on it so there's a lot of exciting things to unpack here and the episode is all about the design principles and interesting thinking that goes on but if you're excited about this project and you want to jump in right away you can do it right now. If you go to stoneblade.com forward slash soulforge, that's S T O N E B L A D E.com.
forward slash S O L F O R G E. Then you can go right to our Kickstarter page. You can see all the details. You can back it. We have bonuses for people that back early, lots of cool exclusives. Obviously it means the world to me and to Richard and to everyone.
Everybody on the team, when you can support our projects, you can also play the game for free on Tabletop Simulator and talk about it on our Discord. There's tons of great stuff. And in this episode, we break down a lot of these principles in a way that's not just interesting for those of you that are.
excited about soul for fusion like we are but also talks a lot about the design principles for building these kinds of modular games and algorithmically procedurally generated games and cards and lots of really cool stuff that's at the cutting edge of game technology today so
I hope that you enjoy this episode. I hope you love the conversation as much as I did. I hope you take the time to please check out SoulForge Fusion, whether you back it or not. It means a lot if you share it, if you share this episode, share the information. It helps me to... continue to do what I do and to keep making new and exciting games for you. So without further ado, here is Richard Garfield. Hello and welcome. I am here.
back with Richard Garfield. Richard, it's great to have you back. It's good to be back. Always fun to talk about games. Yeah, yeah. So you're actually my first repeat guest on the podcast, which is, you know, obviously great to have you as the guest. But it's also because we have something pretty exciting to talk about that we have.
been working on, depending on how you count it, for either a decade or at the very least about 18 months of intense work recently. Yep, yep. Certainly looking forward to chatting about it. So the big thing, which is SoulForge Fusion, our sequel to SoulForge, the digital trading card game that we built back in 2011, 2012.
As we're recording this, we are less than 24 hours away from the Kickstarter launching. So by the time most people are listening to this, the Kickstarter will be live. It's going live at 8 a.m. on uh september 7th 8 a.m pacific time so very likely by the time you're hearing this you can go to kickstarter.com and back us there or stoneblade.com forward slash soulforge will also take you there
But yeah, I wanted to chat with you because there's so many fascinating things about this project and so many fascinating things about what we have chosen to do with how we brought it back and the evolution of really the entire trading card.
game industry frankly and and what has motivated us along the way and i i wanted to unpack that because i've gotten a lot of questions from people and there's so much here that you know i've been trying to like explain in the elevator pitch and the kind of quick line you know a couple lines to get to but i really wanted to take a good amount of time with you and and and unpack like all of the details so let's just let's start off with just soul forge the og right we you and i we met up
at PaxDev in 2011, our first conversation there about this. And we were both excited about this idea of making a really a good... a digital trading card game because at the time this was you know before magic arena this was before hearthstone there really wasn't uh something like that on the market and we were both pretty excited about making it uh yeah that's amazing it was before hearthstone it doesn't feel like anything was before hearthstone but yeah that was
Yeah. And part of something that will become ironic as we go through the story, part of our goal was to build something that would have been very difficult to build. in real life that would have been at the time pretty much impossible to do as a physical game. We built Soul Forge with the idea that cards leveled up as you play them.
Do you remember things about that process? I've got my own recollections, but we're talking about a decade ago now. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you remember about that and what got you excited about that mechanic. Well, I should add for context that one of the reasons we were talking was because I mean, I knew you from your days as a pro with magic, but I caught up with you again because of Ascension, which was a design I admired.
but also had a digital version, which was just so much better than most of the games out there, any game out there. It was just like, it was perfect for it. And so that... And that was one of the reasons why you seemed like a really good partner to work with on a game which was intended to be just digital.
Yeah, and I remember, I've told this story before, but for me, I remember I came to one of your talks at PaxDev, and I've obviously... been an admirer of yours forever magic changed my life and your you know design thinking influenced every project i've ever worked on and then you know at the end of the talk someone asked what game were you
playing them you know and really enjoying right now and you said ascension and i literally like jumped up and went woohoo in the back of the room at the time and i guess we kind of all laughed and then got a chance to talk so uh yeah the process of being able to work on games with you has been
incredible. I've learned so much along the way. And, and yeah, that when we were kind of working through, okay, there's the challenges of executing something digitally, there's the challenges of building a thing that really feels comprehensible.
from a trading card game. When you're building a digital game, they're not really cards that you're trading and selling, but we want to represent them as something that people can understand. Because when I tell you that this is a card, a collectible card, all these preconceived notions come with it.
The idea that I can get these things out of a pack, the idea that these things will be shuffled together and randomized, the idea of what it means, what information is going to be static about a card or an object versus another. There's this interesting... like cognitive heuristic, if you will, that comes with this idea of calling something a card, even though it's purely a digital representation.
Yeah, yeah. I remember we had some brainstorming sessions on what we could do digitally that we couldn't do physically. and then deciding what we should do, because that's, of course, a really different question. The capabilities you have working digitally are really quite large, but you don't want to lose the player's understanding of what's going on. That's often, I think, one of the things which separates.
the games which feel like analog games and the games which feel like sort of a simulation online, which are... you know, often excellent, both of them can be excellent, but when you play a StarCraft or what have you, it feels very different than playing a Scrabble. And we wanted to use the power that we had, but at the same time not make it so the player lost that tether with really understanding everything. Yeah.
Yeah, and I remember we experimented with a few pretty interesting ideas. You mentioned StarCraft. We experimented with a few game engines that used concepts like fog of war, right, where your opponent could be playing things and you don't necessarily get that information right away and different ways to reveal that.
exploration. We had explored a lot of that space. But what we landed on was this level up mechanic, which is something I really... i think it really resonated with players at the time and it still resonates today this idea that you know yes you build the deck of cards but as you play you're you're actually building your deck as you play because every card you choose to play
It has three levels, and when you play the card, you get the level one function of it right now, and then the level two function gets added to your discard pile and shuffled into your deck later. And so the cost of playing cards ends up being really...
an opportunity cost, right? Because I could play a very strong level one card now, for example, and then it might level up worse until the later versions are weaker than others might be, or vice versa, where I play a weak level one card now with the hope. that i have a more powerful card later and so we we have no traditional casting cost or you know it like like other tcgs um like magic but we use this system to create not only a balance but also this this story arc and this texture
for these different cards that end up being expressed in a far deeper way than you could do with just a single card or single version of a card. Yeah, it really hit. a lot of the notes which we had set out to hit with a digital card game, which is to say the players understood mechanically what was going on. We made that very clear, even if the consequences of it were not clear. And it did something which would be awkward.
to do in real life. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a great, a great point to make this idea that it's clear to the player what is going on, but the, the nuanced effects of it. are take a long time to unpack right so the basic rules of soulforge is like you have a hand of five cards you can play any two cards out of your hand into one of five lanes if they're a creature and then the cards you play level up
And so it's very just OK, pick two out of five, go and see what happens is is at the surface level, you can enter the game and play that way. But then as you explore deeper now, it's like, OK, well, actually, I need to I want to be building around this, you know.
Do I want to be playing for a late game? Do I want to be playing for an early game? What are the different, you know, interaction points about where these creatures are going to be played and how they match up against the opponent's creatures and kind of all of these layers that get unpacked, which I think is just really key for especially any kind of...
of collectible or expandable game where the the the this you need to be accessible when somebody's coming in the door you need to be and have that like nice learning curve all the way along the way all the way up to sort of expert level players which you know you need to be
very conscious of and this is something you've always hammered home to me in our discussions and something i really appreciate that you want to make sure that that gameplay experience is good for people at all tiers not just people at the very high end or at the very low end it's got to be a kind of good smooth curve all the way through
Yeah, that's an easy thing for a lot of designers to lose track of because they play... their games with the same people and they become experts over time and then sort of lose track of the journey and some fun things they had along the way might, you know, might disappear.
It's an experience I have reasonably often where I play a game that I think looks like it was really fun to develop, but what's left... is only fun if i become an expert yeah um yeah so uh so yeah keeping an eye on that is uh has always been uh is is is a good good practice which we have done Yeah, no, it's a great tip, especially for aspiring designers out there, because I know my very first designs and games I worked on back in the Versus system...
trading card game days i absolutely fell into this trap and i came at it from as a pro magic player like i knew what top tier play should look like and what But all I could think about was balancing for that. And so the game became very flat and very uninspiring for people moving their way through the curve. And I learned that lesson eventually, but hopefully listeners can learn a little.
quit more quickly than than i had to um okay so so we've gone and we covered you know soulforge we you know we ran a kickstarter for uh back in 2012 we launched the game it lasted for several years we launched a bunch of expansions but eventually you know, as a digital game, we couldn't continue to keep it up and it went down. And since then, we've been trying to think of ways to bring it back, right? What does a new version of SoulForge look like that can...
exist in the modern era because this is one of the things that I think drives both of us as designers was right we always want to kind of push the boundary of like what's the next thing like what how do we say something as designers and make something that contributes to the overall discussion of
games and and bring something new to the table and you of course are you know probably more influential than anybody else on the planet when it comes to this by creating the the entire trading card game uh genre uh with match the gathering um but then also why we did soulforge was to be able to build
trading card games into the digital space in a way that hadn't been done up to that point. But now it's been done very well. As you said, it's hard to imagine a world before Hearthstone. Now with Hearthstone and Magic Arena and Runeterra, and there's plenty of like... good successful games you've launched several of them uh that um you know and and and there's a lot that's that space is well explored but yeah
uh what we're talking about with soulforge now is this exploration of new space which is what we're calling a hybrid deck game and some of the origins of that are in the unique deck game category that you also originated with Keyforge. So maybe you want to talk a little bit about that and kind of how that leads into what Soulforge Fusion is.
Sure. Key Forge came out a few years ago, and we called it the first unique deck game, as you said. Although I think... I kind of want to call it random deck game now because of reasons. But in any case, what happens with Keyforge is that players get a coherent deck and they're not allowed to, they don't construct it.
and they just play what they've got. If they like their deck, they play with them more, otherwise they might get a different deck. And it was made because... I really think that there's a lot of gameplay that's lost when you start introducing
deck construction there's a lot of variety that's lost in the sort of decks which become playable and uh i was thinking back to the early days of magic where we would play these leagues and uh and you would get a set of decks and some boosters and that's what you're stuck with weeks and it was it was a lot of fun and i wanted to get a similar sort of experience where where you had to make the most of the tools you got and that was what the game was about
and that everybody's tools were unique, which was how I originally thought of magic, but the way it's played, often that promise, which a lot of people see at the beginning, is not. maintained because at the beginning everything's unique but then as they become more and more serious they end up playing more and more net decks and everybody starts playing sort of a more similar tableau of decks.
With the Keyforge style approach, you've got the capability of making it so that doesn't happen. Everybody's deck truly is unique. Yeah. And I think for those that want to have a deeper dive into Key Forge and some of the logic behind that, we talked about that quite a bit actually on our first podcast recording, which we'll link to, people can link to from the Think Like Game Designer page.
because I was fascinated by it. And it's part of what I was like digging into was like, okay, well, what would this look like if we wanted to evolve it further, right? So the advantages of the unique deck game or random deck game or whatever you want to call it is this, you know. feeling of playing with a limited subset of options, which is part of what makes
what's called limited formats in magic or in TCG is so much fun, right? The idea that when I get either a league and I have a small set of cards I have to work with or a draft or a sealed deck or something where it's like, I'm forced to work with a smaller...
subset of fixed things creates more game variety, creates more interesting situations, forces you to play with and adapt to more of the cards and scenarios than typically will happen. Like what naturally tends to happen in a constructed... tcg environment is things always coalesce around one or a few different deck archetypes and everybody kind of
builds towards those and they get so hyper optimized that that variance and and interesting place basis is severely limited right that's kind of the the top line of like what's valuable about it um
Now, there are other challenges that come up from that and things that started to become noticeable from Keyforge's experience as the kind of leader in the space. And one is, A, how often does your... variety become unusable or what are the acceptable types of variety right if i have a deck that has for you know easy things a zombie lord and no zombies
yes, that's variety, but it's also just sad variety, right? Like there's certain types of scenarios that yes, it's variance, but that's not a good kind of variance. And so I know Keyforge did some things to correct for that and SoulForge Fusion. has taken a lot of steps to correct for that and and then there's the other piece of it which is this this feeling of ownership over your deck um this feeling of
I made this thing. I have some influence over this thing, which is a challenging thing for the unique decks, right? In that world, I feel like I just bought it and I can master playing it. maybe i get some ownership out of playing it particularly well but it i know a lot of people that miss that that ability to sort of customize and own things uh and and so that's been another sort of tension point around what
can you get the best of both worlds? And I'm obviously seeding this one, teeing it up to you, but maybe you want to talk about how we tried to solve these problems with SoulForge Fusion. Yeah, I should first... say that Making this game from the start was something I was skeptical about, but Justin kept coming back at me with it. And after playing it a bit, I decided, yeah, he really is onto something and maybe really could do this.
Part of what made it mechanically feasible was the fact that we could print decks which were coherent. as opposed to make it so you had to construct decks along with all their level up cards, which would have been very hard. yeah that's a great that's a great that's a great point and just yeah just to sort of to re-emphasize right like why because the natural the natural question for people that are we're fans of original soulforge and that we're like why didn't you just print this
as it's as a digital trading card game just or sorry as a physical version of the same digital trading card game and and that reality of it is that it's very difficult in a game with multiple cards let level every card is multiple cards to level up having to collect and customize
and create on an individual card level is very cumbersome. Like we did research it for a while and it just felt like too hard to make it work. And so this model works particularly well for something like SoulForge Fusion. Yeah, and even when you have it running, just verifying your opponent's deck is legal or your deck is legal is a real chore. And so, yeah, this was a really nice solution to it. But then you took it one step.
further and added this unique hook, which is that you've got this little bit of customization introduced by the fact that rather than having a single random deck, you've got a... random half deck and you choose what other random half deck you want to mate it with. So you have the pre-constructed element, but you also have this little bit of customization, which is of course quite powerful is you get to choose which two partners you want to bring to the table.
Yeah. And this one, and again, this is, you know, just as design tips for people, a lot of times really just the... concept a that you like plus concept b that you like with your own unique spin on it is a great recipe for designing new games right and so in this world it was the game smash up was my inspiration behind the you know take any two decks and shuffle them together
like that is just a it was amazing to me playing it how much again variety and ownership i felt playing that game even though i was just taking two pre-built mixed decks and putting them together, the difference between zero customization choices and one customization choice.
from an emotional standpoint is huge and then combining that with this idea of the unique kind of algorithmically generated decks like from keyforge with the soulforge game engine really started to kind of gel together something like wow this is something new and special that
hasn't been done before, even though, again, it's just based on the building blocks of what came before. And no matter how original the idea seems, right, even it very often... is that right i know you've you've talked about this before in interviews where magic the idea of customizing came from um cosmic encounters was a big inspiration and being able to play something that you could play at the you know dungeons and dragons kind of table in between rounds uh you were able to
kind of bring things together that then obviously turned into a great new category that then became the thing that other people built off of. Yeah. Yeah, in fact, this simple twist is a really strong approach. Worth noting that a lot of times in design, what you should do is take a look at what your innovations are.
and ask if they're really pulling their weight. Because what you don't want is to have a game full of innovation, but the innovations aren't really adding anything to the player. They're just giving them different crap to think about. Yes.
I kind of think of that as being about the designer and not about the player. Like, oh, there's all these fancy things I can do. Look, we can change all the rules that you're used to and make them all different. But at the end of the day, if all that happens is they learn all these different rules. and they end up with a game which is similar, then it's not worth it. And so focusing instead on these small, smaller...
innovation twists and building off stuff and then trying to keep things similar where you're not really getting a lot of value out of it. I find that to be a useful framework to work in. yeah i think that's great and and it is it underlines what is again a very counterintuitive but really important point that like innovation for innovation's sake is not valuable in fact it can be a negative that that if you you innovate too much uh becomes harder for people to
learn and kind of grok what's going on in your game and that focusing on a few key innovations um sometimes even just one key innovation can be enough to really um you know hook people and then just executing that well and communicating it clearly
can be enough to make something that's really special. Absolutely. And it's actually really, it's been really interesting here as well because we've... you know i've wrestled with that a lot and sometimes it's it's actually even hard to explain uh some of what's going on with soulforge fusion because we have the you know the every half deck is unique combine any two half decks to play is that's the kind of new innovation here and that's relatively
relatively easy to push across we have the the level up mechanic which is not an innovation for soulforge fusion but was an innovation for soulforge uh originally and so for people who aren't familiar with soulforge that's another kind of it's new to them right a new innovation and then we have the process of um really we kind of took it took the process of digitally creating cards
even a step further right because so in in keyforge the decks are algorithmically generated and sometimes some cards can like add add icons or slight modifiers to other cards but for the most part the set of cards is is coherent in each set uh and you're just picking from that subset of i think it's a couple hundred cards that build each of the of the decks and
in soulforge fusion we actually took the idea of fusing cards together uh and took it to another level where i can now combine kind of the base of a card so if i have like a yeti creature and then i can combine a modifier and fuse those things together so i could have aggressive yeti or an ice yeti or a flame yeti and each of those things would be a different card uh and that is something that is was you know never really been done before as far as i know and it's allowed us to have
you know over 17 000 possible unique cards in set one alone uh and that's something that you and i talked about a little bit because it's That sounds really cool and we've used it in marketing and there's a lot of really good things about it, but it also has challenges that come with it, right? Trying to understand a set of that size. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the upsides and downsides and how we thought through that approach because we talked about that for quite a while.
Yeah, I should begin with saying that that is certainly something I aimed for in Key Forge, and it was something I shot. I really wanted to see procedurally generated cards. which is how to think about them, I guess.
And I wasn't really super happy with how they were done in Key Forge until later we came up with some good techniques. But one of the things I kept running into was... this tension between wanting players to understand the environment, know the cards that are out there, and wanting to give them this variety on more than just a card level.
And so the concept of giving them basically an adjective and a noun, your cybernetic yeti or your zombie dragon, allows... players to get a step in that direction where they can begin to understand what to expect from particular adjectives and what to expect from particular nouns. There is still a challenge to understanding the environment because it is so much bigger than really any other card game.
I think that's true, at least for the first set. But at the same time, there's a huge amount of variety and that tool of being able to understand it at least on an adjective noun level. helps a lot yeah we we ended up in a space i think we were doing the math and it was like more you know we have more unique cards available than than like the first 20 years of magic or you know any other any other card game um but but but
yeah you're highlighting i think what's what's important is that that you want to make it so that people can can wrap their heads around what's going on and variety for variety's sake is not a good thing right not necessarily like there was um there was a game uh i was tangentially involved with but uh only kind of on the sidelines was a chaotic uh which was a kids tcg that had it had random
powers on the card so like you would have some of one version of a monster would be stronger than another the exact same card you just have to look at it to see what the stats were and it would just be kind of all over the place and it just wasn't you know it just all it was was kind of a driver that got people to collect
more if they wanted to get the highest power version of these but the rest of them you just got a worse version of a card or you could never know what a card was going to do by just seeing the name and so it became very difficult for players to understand and interact with it whereas what with the way we've done soulforge fusion
you know if you see the name of a card you will you can know exactly what it is um the same name card the the zombie dragon will always be the same zombie dragon but that you could also run into a cybernetic dragon which is going to be different and so even though so that 17 000 number really comes from a permutation set of like 200 adjectives and nouns that combine together in various ways. So it's, I think, a good way that we were able to get the best of both worlds.
And the other thing that it influences is just like when you think about variety in a digitally printed game like this, it's not just about the rarity of the cards, but because the cards are pre-built into half decks.
that's really the proper unit of rarity to think about like the context of the zombie dragon when he's in a deck full of you know other zombies and zombie lords versus when he's in a deck of you know some dragons and some other kind of synergies is very very different and so that's been some that was the biggest eye-opener for me i think talking to you when we were you know i've been
in the trading card game space my whole life and developing them both playing whether it's playing on the pro tour or developing them for you know for high level play forever but it just completely changed the equation when i thinking about how do you develop a a hybrid deck game uh where where you know the the chunks are kind of predefined in a lot of ways yeah it's a it
For people who are entrenched in trading card games, it's such a different way to think about the games. They think about a particular card they like and they look for it. And it takes them so long to realize that they may end up with something that's fun when they find it. But the fact is that the thing you're playing with is a unit, which is this whole deck. And you just can't separate the context of that card from the rest of the deck. Yeah.
yeah i think it's it's it's really a powerful it's it's a powerful frame reshift and and it re it creates a couple of interesting things so one you know that we we have built into our algorithm i think we alluded to this earlier but we built in a lot of tools to the algorithm to make sure that each deck comes with a certain amount of synergy
already built in that it won't like you won't get a zombie lord without zombies in the deck right you won't get something that's going to be sort of this doesn't make any sense this is the the bad kind of randomness so we filter that sort of stuff out but we still give quite a range of possible outcomes that you can discover.
And Soul Forge Fusion as a hybrid deck game gives you that additional excitement of saying, okay, cool, I've got the zombie dragon I want, but now I want to go find and pair it with something else that can work well. And because you can customize by...
choosing the two half decks you want together uh you still have this interesting ability of like saying okay cool if i can find another half deck with this piece then i can make the the combinations that i want coming in and coming together so there's really this fun there is that fun you know
looking for the right shoe to fit the glass slipper or whatever. Yeah. No, that's a powerful thing to have in your pocket. I know that when we... keyforge was first out i i aired uh as i'm sure i mentioned on the last podcast on the side of variety and it took me uh basically the first release before i realized oh you know i've really got to take a little more responsibility for
getting those combos in the deck and make it so that that variety is good variety. And the fact that you, that with Soul Forest Fusion, we can... and put some of that on the players that they can find the deck that makes their combos work. is good. We don't want to lean on it entirely. We want to make it so that half deck still has a good feeling to it. But that they can bring that out with the right choice of partner deck is terrific.
Yeah, yeah. And I really just can't wait to kind of unleash this on the world, obviously. One of the things that's actually been cool is that players can actually play the game right now if they want to for free. In fact, it's one of the... the side effects of the of the pandemic is that it forced us to move all of our testing into tabletop simulator um you know we couldn't meet up in real life and so we started playing uh our games in the background on tabletop simulator
And this was during our first Ascension Tactics Kickstarter last year. We were originally planning to market the game. you know the way we normally would go to conventions do physical demos like and then all of that shut down and so we said okay well maybe we should just make our tabletop simulator version available online so people can actually just play exactly the thing we've been playing and that was such a
a breakthrough for us that people could join us in our discord and give us feedback and play with us and you know play with their friends for free and so it was kind of a no-brainer uh to bring that to tabletop simulator for for soulforge fusion And in fact, it's how you and I, I think it wasn't until, what, two months ago that we actually played a game in real life for the first time? Yeah.
Yeah, it was pretty recently. Tabletop Simulator was certainly what sold me on the idea. You had sent me some... prototype cards earlier and uh and uh wasn't really enough to convince me i did play around with those with my son and thought there was some cool stuff going on but uh when we sat down and uh uh and uh did our did a
session on tabletop. It was a lot of fun. For anybody that wants to see more about the game, you can play it right now for free if you have that program. I think the program is usually $20 or goes on sale for $10. uh a lot um and and then it uh it's also provided a hook for us because a lot of soul forge players really you know they know they joined the game when it was originally just a purely digital game this is a game that we really wanted to be physical
first using this digitally printing technology and being able to do things we hadn't been done in the physical space. But we also recognize that building these communities and being able to play together online is important. And so not only can you play...
kind of demo versions of it on tabletop simulator right now but one of the other things that we've done is we've made it so that every deck can be scanned uh every physical deck has a qr code and an alphanumeric code that you can enter into our database and then we will
export a deck for you that you can play your deck in tabletop simulator. And so we can actually have tournaments. And one of the things that we wanted to do is, you know, have real community and real play, not just in local game stores, which are, of course, important.
conventions which you know we're going to be doing all of that stuff but so that you know you could play even if you don't have a local community and we can all get together and your collection means something even if you don't have a local group to play with and I think that's just it's like a really powerful thing that
i i know i and i don't know where you came down on this richard but i was so against tabletop simulator two years ago i was like it's too clunky it's not the same it's not you know and and and i it But for the pandemic really forcing me to get past that mental block and building this community, I never would have gone there. So it's been an incredibly powerful tool and been a great way to connect with people.
Yeah, no, I'm similar. When Tabletop Simulator first came out, I was excited about it enough that I bought a few copies and gave them out to friends and family that I haven't been able to play with for a while. In the end, it turned out to be more work than it was work to prototype with or play test with. But with the pandemic forcing my hand, I got past that hump and now it's... Regardless of how things develop in Plague World, Tabletop Simulator will be part of my arsenal.
Yeah, and it's one of those things where for a very common question I've been getting from original SoulForge players is will there ever be another... customized app for soulforge and and certainly it's something i want to build um i've i've learned a lot over the years it's very expensive to build and maintain uh and so having this as a tool uh that can be kind of this bridge solution of like you can build a physical game play your physical
game uh and then have some way to play online uh and then you know hopefully down the road we can build our own custom app again but but for now it's like it's just a it's a great way to connect and a great way to be able to play a game in whatever format you want to play it right that's that's definitely been You know, it's the other side of the equation with physical games and especially trying to launch a game, you know, like this, if you don't have a community to play with.
it's it's it's like you might as well not have it right like it's it's you need people that can play the game with you and if it's a solid local community then it's fantastic but here at least you can have an online community and i've noticed a lot of other publishers that have really shunned things like tabletops. They'll shut down any mods that they see online. They try to shut down the capacity for people to play their game online because...
Well, you know, in theory, they're not paying for it, which is true. But I found that, you know, it's largely the opposite. Like if you let a community... grow and thrive and let them play your game, enough people are going to want to support it and actually buy it that it's worth, it actually is the best thing you could do for the long term health of a game that you care about. Yeah, certainly. I am there. If people are playing the games, I think the...
That you're all set. That's going to be great. Because, you know, it's like it's just it's just building that community is is the most important thing. And and that's the best way for people to know. what they're getting with the game and to know that it's right for them.
Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. You can test it and see, like, do I like this game? If so, cool, I'll buy it. If not, great. You got to learn that without having to spend a dime. And that's also fantastic, right? You know, you want, I don't want people buying my game that don't. enjoy it. I want everybody to get a huge amount of value out of it that's there. And so it's a great way to let people do that.
maybe it's worth us talking a little bit more about community in general and and you know maybe some of our you know we've we've talked a lot about organized play and what does that look like in the world where you have a hybrid deck game um and
it's it's just something that just feels so central to anything like this being able to be a long-term like successful game and property maybe maybe we can kind of riff on that a little bit like what what what does it take to build a good community for a game like this Well, that's certainly a big topic, but one of the things that I would look for is that players can engage with the game in...
in a lot of different ways and looking for different things. So if everybody is engaged with the game... on a ladder which is constantly giving you a rating, then it's sort of strictly one-dimensional serious play. If there's environments where people can play casually, play with their friends, pick up games.
tournaments that don't necessarily carry a huge weight on their overall standing, things like that. It allows for people to play the game for other purposes than just being the best in the world.
and uh so so yeah i look for i look for lots of different ways for people to play the game yeah i think that's a i think that's a great insight and that it appeals in you know to sort of different and the psychographic profiles is the kind of buzzwordy way to say it but you know different different player needs right that that i you know
uh want to be just hanging out with my friends and playing around the kitchen table versus i want to prove that i'm the best in the world versus i want to build the the coolest you know yeti deck and have all the yetis or i want to be able to um you know like have different modes of play right so i think something that keyforge did a lot of innovation in is like what does it mean to have a balanced matchup between different decks where you could play
uh you know you would play i'd play your deck and you play my deck in a round and see who could play the pilot the decks better it wasn't about the deck it was about the player i think there's um and and it's something i'm actually excited about when it comes to building this game.
via kickstarter and being a via our discord and play testing with people like you there's been so much action in our discord of people giving us feedback on the rules and templating and different ideas for cards and and it's been and i think the same thing is what i'm looking
for when it comes to organized play, right? We're going to have, you know, league based events and we have a storyline events planned where people who care about our lore and our story can influence the story based on what they do and performance in tournaments. We have like an app we're developing that allows people.
to when you play in a tournament you scan your deck in and then you can actually based on which forgeborn you're using which is like your forgeborn avatar you can you'll then get an opportunity to vote on what that what your character will do in the next
version of the story and uh you know i think some players are really into story some players are really not and that's like not going to be their thing but it's a very cool thing and also lets us react much faster because i did digitally printed cards uh we can make them much faster so we can have things
be reflected in the card pool um even much more so than i think would have been possible in any other game category um and we're also experimenting with different different cool ideas for how you balance the if you're playing you know the same decks against each other um you know uh keyforge had this concept of chains where you would
you know have some restrictions on your card pool or number of cards in hand soulforge makes that i think even easier by because your your health totals are so critical to the game so you could bid health for the different half decks we can have things like side
boarding where you can because you have half decks you could have your your main deck and even sideboard in different half decks so we built in tools for if any particular archetype becomes dominant there's tools to attack that archetype and there's so many different interesting little ways we can play with
what the organized play looks like. And for those of you that are out there and participating in our Discord or participating in our Kickstarter, you can help give us feedback and help us build that out because it's not going to launch until 2022. So we've got time to really finalize those details. Yeah. And exploring a really varied, organized play is much easier to do with physical product than it is digitally.
The games that are purely digital, you have to work very hard to make them not one-dimensional, focused on the top players.
But yeah, when you've got a physical component to it, you've got the locality of it allows you to really explore different ways to play. Yeah, yeah. People just take ownership of it and they're going to play in ways that we don't... expect right now you know i mean one of the other things that is um is certainly possible for people though it's not what we're trying you know because in
Key Forge, every deck had a unique back because they couldn't be customized at all. Soul Forge Fusion, because they are customizable, the cards have... common back and so i've already had people that are messaging like oh i want to custom you know actually build this like it's a tcg and build my own deck i'm like well that's not
how i envision it being played but you could do whatever you want with it right it's your physical decks and that's certainly a possibility and i'm so i'm sure you know that that that the fact that people can take ownership of it in such a deep way is uh is something that you know is exciting and it's just you know they're your cards you can kind of play with them as you as you see fit yeah absolutely And then we'll see. I think it's really illustrative, the story of Magic Commander format.
That was not a format. Maybe you should tell that story because it's pretty interesting. Well, Magic has had many, many formats over its lifetime, but certainly the Commander format, which is a... uh five person free for all is that any number free fall i don't think i think it's any number any number so so uh Anyway, that was the one that really took hold and the players really began to coalesce around and eventually it did become a...
formal part of the game. And that's terrific. I'm all about players taking ownership of their own play experiences. And if enough people... go in that direction and that can become part of the formal experience as well. Yeah, it was really the fan-created format that became so popular and so supported just by fans that then Wizards started actually making products specifically for it and started really catering to that.
part of the community because the fans told you what they want and uh and so that's something that i'm looking forward to um as we get soulforge into more soulforge fusion into more and more people's hands of seeing what they resonate with what formats are they excited about how can we continue to improve the game and make as you start talking about innovations that matter right innovations that meaningfully
yeah improve the experience and and we're designing yeah use the many tools which uh which you have available with uh with the the framework which has been designed i mean there's so much you can do Yeah, we've already, as people may or may not expect, we're already well into working on set two designs and developments because that's how you have to do it.
to work and it's there's so much space that's still left to explore here from the game design perspective and then the list of experimentations and things we want to do with organized play and different formats of play and some particularly interesting and innovative ones that you've come up with that I'm not going to spoil here that we're going to try testing out is there's just so much really exciting stuff that
you know we're just kind of scratching the surface of i mean and and the what can be done with the digital printing technology and the way that we can get you know a lot of like very rare case things to happen and having uh you know Actually, maybe this is worth exploring a little bit. Let's talk about set design and making new sets in a game like this, in a digitally printed game, in a hybrid deck game, compared to a traditional TCG. Because you've also...
taught me a lot about how to think about that. And I bet that would be pretty interesting to people. What do you think about when you're creating new sets in a game like this compared to traditional card games?
Well, a lot of what I'm thinking is the same, although there are some differences. But, of course, there's a lot of extra opportunity. But certainly the main thing I do with... most massively modular games, which is how I sort of categorize all these games, is look at what strategies I want to play and...
and try to figure out how to make them come out in the mechanics which we're using and look at which strategies I get frustrated by and try to add some mechanics which frustrate those strategies back. But then the opportunity which is opened up with... procedurally with unique deck games and further with procedurally deck generated cards is that you can
create these situations, which you're doing more than just creating a set of cards. You're creating sort of machines. Because... you're in in a game like magic you just you know you create all these cards and people figure out how to put them together but here not only can you create a card you can you can create
you can create, you can have that influence the rest of the half deck and influence all the cards up and down the level up queue. And so in a sense, the dimension of the machine you're working with with has grown a lot. And that allows you to do things like, as you like to say, tell a story. You can make it so that the level up tells a story. You can also make it so that the way one of the cards touches another in your half deck tells a story.
Yeah, so let's, you know, let's flesh that out with some illustrations, right? So there's a, you know, one of the sort of most iconic cards from original Soul Forge, which is also in Soul Forge Fusion, is Krogius. Krogius starts off as this little, the smallest possible creature. It's just like a little 1-1 cute guy. Then level two, it becomes this cocoon.
defensive like wall creature and then in level three it's the biggest monster we have it's just giant you know comes out of the cocoon is this giant beast that crushes things right and that's like this this arc of a card over over time or a dragon egg that turns into a dragon wealth that turns into a giant fire breathing dragon right you kind of see the evolution across of a card and then when you talk about things like like horizontal influence right like there's this
I think the example that we've talked about is, you know, there's maybe this, you know, the... cursed witch and that the cursed witch will turn another creature into now a toad at level one and now that other creature is like a toad yeti and then and and then later in that so it turns into this little you know the level one is like really weird and small but then now the level
two gets a bigger bonus once he transforms back from a toad into a yeti and uh you know and so that the fact that there was this cursing witch in your deck influenced it laterally or you know a zombie bite turns another creature into a zombie so you have more zombies in your deck um and so there's this cool like influence across cards that tells the story
uh that's also really like yeah just the the possibilities there and how you how you do all that stuff the types of things you can make happen is really really cool yeah and uh and uh um there's different ways uh to Well, I guess I'll refrain from spoiling much along those lines because we don't know where we're going to go with that. But it's enough to say that there's a lot of things you can do.
with both horizontal and vertical. You've got now two dimensions where you only had one before. Yeah. yeah and there's there's something else i so i'm gonna talk about a couple of things there's one of the comments that you made uh to me that kind of blew my mind right uh in in the way we think about different different factions and how so you know every faction in in or you know category in one of these, we call this sort of massively.
what was it what was the phrase you used to describe this the category i'm calling them massively modular games massively modular games okay cool so in in uh that that one of the tools for building a massively modular game is you build you break things down into categories right it's called
and magic factions and soulforge fusion and that each category is defined by certain traits what is this good at what is it bad at what types of things should i expect from there and that helps me as a player so as a designer to understand
Even though there may be thousands of pieces in individual components, I can kind of group them together and understand them. One of the challenges in a traditional trading card game is if you ever make a good card... in a certain faction that faction is now just good at that right so if i'm you know and let's we use magic as an example right if you know red is the faction that's good at doing direct damage but i make
one good direct damage card in green, which isn't supposed to be able to do that. Now green is suddenly good. Everyone that plays green will all play that good direct damage card. And so the color pie, the breakdown between different factions is ruined. Right. So note there that the reason why that's happening is it doesn't matter how rare you make that card, which originally, of course, was one of the ways we tried to control it, because it's a construct. game.
uh often a constructed game players who want that will get it which means that it's effectively not rare it's just what you see all the time if uh you're playing green and uh and they have any use for uh direct damage which they generally do
Right. And so, but in a... hybrid deck game like this like soul force fusion that's actually not the case right because not only you can get you might go chase after that one super rare card but what that's going to mean is going to be in the context of the other cards that it comes with and so it will forcibly getting one copy of a card that's good at a thing in a in a given faction is still very different than
if another faction's very good at that same thing there you're going to get multiple copies of of cards that could do direct damage in in the case we're talking about um and so the the idea that a faction can still have elements of effects and abilities that aren't traditionally its strength is actually really, really interesting and allows you to be a lot more granular in how you define and develop each faction and each identity over time.
Yeah, it's really liberating as a designer. I noticed in Key Forge that we launched with seven houses in Key Forge and have introduced others. You will likely never see... more colors and magic, except just sort of as a novelty thing. It really undermines the rest of magic to begin adding a new color. It would just make the overall game worse. the overall game experience worse except for novelty. But with Keyforge...
you could design a house, a color, much more like a character where they, you know, they act, you know, they're mostly this way, but a little this way, right? In books, you can have nuance. characters and lands described which are not just black and white, always the same. And so we found that you could bring that range of personality to... factions. And yeah, it didn't break anything. It just meant each of the houses had its own personality, which sometimes overlapped and sometimes didn't.
So it's a lot easier to design really flavorful houses. Yeah, so Soul Forge Fusion has four factions at launch, but it's definitely something that's opened up my mind to being able to expand that more than we were ever willing to in original Soul Forge, because that was more of a traditional trading card game.
and another thing so i think that's one area of real interest and also we you know we haven't really talked about the the forge born um at all here um which is another kind of new thing in soul forge fusion
In the original Soul Forge, the Forgeborn were kind of our iconic marquee characters, and their differentiating factor was that they had four levels, whereas everybody else just had three levels. But that was, while cool, because you could design these level four... cards that were really powerful and cool looking they very rarely came into play um because they were you know most games ended before you would get to shuffle your deck enough times to start playing level four cards um
And now we've made the Forgeborn far more front and center. They actually were partially inspired by the idea of the Commander game. where you, you know, variant of magic, where you have a kind of avatar type character that's always out in front of you. And so maybe you want to talk a little bit about that and how that kind of evolved. Yeah, certainly from the very launch of Magic, people have talked about wanting...
a character that they were playing, a focal point. In early design, it never really panned out. I never had anything which really felt good. Commander, they have a technique which works well. I actually forget how it works, but you nominate a card and maybe you can tell me how it works.
uh yeah i think it's like your whichever card you have dictates which colors you're allowed to play so the colors that are present in whatever your commander creature is so typically you pick a multi-color one i think dictate what colors are allowed to be in your deck and then you can summon the commander as though it was in your hand and every time it dies it goes back to your command zone and i think costs you
correct me if i'm wrong i may be wrong but it costs you more every time you want to resummit yeah yeah you're not i was i'm talking to the audience maybe forgive both of us if we get the gist of it wrong but this is the gist of it we got the gist of it right at the end we certainly might have had details wrong
Anyway, choosing the commander is really fun. It sets up, I mean, in more than just a mechanical way, it sets up the personality for your deck, but it ties in in this really nice mechanical way as well. Yeah, yeah. And so with the Forgeborn, we ended up taking it in that each deck...
that each half deck comes with a Forgeborn that's sort of the commander of that deck. It's the thing that's tied to those pieces. The Forgeborn starts in play and it gets powers that you can use every time you level up or you reshuffle.
your deck so he has no power is at the first couple turns of the game then after you shuffle he gets access to a level two power then another three turns go by then he gets access to a level three power now three turns go by he gets access to his level four power which you know should generally be ending the game pretty pretty soon thereafter
And so those are, it's a very cool way. And this is actually, you know, we talked about how we used the procedurally generated process for the... what you know the kind of fused creatures with the adjective noun but we've also procedurally generated these forge born and this is actually a process we we went through quite a few different takes on so maybe you can talk a little bit about how these guys are being generated and what what thoughts went into that
Yeah. So as Justin said, level one, there's nothing. And then there's three levels where you have these different powers. And it... You could just take these random powers and bang them on and get something, so they get generally more powerful as they go up.
uh that that approach feels kind of uh it's hard to design to and it's hard for the players to uh get their head around exactly what the forgeborn is doing because it does three random things every time and so uh what we had some luck with was was making it so that each forge-born has a small set of powers which they can access. I think we're going with four.
Yes, that's right. It's at least four. We could do more, but the more you do, the sort of noisier it gets. It's nice to look at a forge horn and know about what it does. And so you're going to get three of those four.
uh power tracks and then you're going to get a second level version of one of them a third level version of one of them and a fourth level version of one of them so so for example if you've got uh somebody who's a necromantic inclination, they might have a power which raises the dead.
if they have access to that track, they'll have a level 2 raise the dead, a level 3 raise the dead, or a level 4. just one of those and similarly they might have some sort of drain life ability where they do some damage and gain some life and so they'll have one of those appear and so when you when you opposite them you know uh about you know the sort of things they do and it it becomes easy for the players easier for the players to look at it and sort of
get their heads around what they're being opposed by. Oh, they've got the raised dad at level two. So you can sort of play around that, that sort of thing. Right. And again, it speaks to the point we talked about earlier. It's like we're trying to balance this ability that we have to have so much variety in these procedural generated cards with the...
the need and the desire for players to be able to understand what's going on and to be able to see a card and kind of at a glance, understand the gist of what's happening. And, and I felt that pressure even more so. with the Forgeborn than with other cards because the Forgeborn are kind of our iconic characters that are part of the story. They're the things that are going to be in play 100% of the time. And so it's very important.
uh for us to to make them understandable right and the difference of okay this is kind of a necromancer lord so yeah he's going to raise zombies and drain life and you know kill kill things instantly right that all kind of fits around this
concept of like okay he's a necromancy lord versus you know this guy is a you know hyper aggressive fighter and so he's going to give your creatures a bonus to attack or do you know move things around or you know make them aggressive right that that the powers even though there's a white variety of powers and combinations that they fit within a understandable heuristic that makes the character come to life and be understandable both from a story and gameplay perspective.
No, that's something during development we keep coming back to, kept coming back to. It's this tension between variety and accessibility. Like it's no fun.
to sit down to a game where every time you see a card you've got to read it completely and you can't sort of look at the title and get an idea of what's going on but at the other hand uh you know the variety you've got available you really want to make the most use out of it And so you end up with solutions like that, where you've chosen this chunk of variety that has a lot of different...
possibilities but at the same time people can hopefully get their head around and sort of at a glance know kind of how it works after playing a little bit yeah yep and and it's it's a it's been it's been a real It's been a real joy and a real...
interesting set of challenges that we have worked through to kind of get this game to where it is and get it to the point where it's you know something that i know you were very skeptical of at the beginning and with good justification that we could take this this level up mechanic and this purely
digital game and turn it into something physical and turn it into something that that really evolved on on your concept of the unique deck games and and creates new procedurally generated technologies and and really you know again like we talked about it earlier it's like this taking something that is that is familiar that we you know the elements of games that we both love and and applying like meaningful innovation that really
hopefully takes the industry forward and gives people something exciting and fun to play with. And as the time that people are going to be able to hear this, they can go check it out and back it live on Kickstarter.
So I think that we've covered a lot of the major stuff. There's still tons of details that we could pack into, but I know we're a little short on time. So if anybody that wants to know more, you can go to... stoneblade.com forward slash soulforge s-o-l-f-o-r-g-e and that will not only take you to where the kickstarter page is to join our discord and ask questions so join the tabletop simulator mod where we built all the tools so you can play the game right away
And you'll be able to see what we're doing and still influence the game as it evolves. And that's one of the things that we're continuing to work on. As soon as we're done here and getting this thing out the door, we're working on set two and working on cool designs. And there's tons of different things we have.
even talked about that we've we've been playing around with things like uh solo and modes and ways to play against uh you know kind of cooperatively and all kinds of other ways that this can go that we want to see what what fans want and how we play uh how this game evolves how this community evolves what does organized play look like so
I strongly encourage everybody to come join us. Come check it out. Come let us know what you think. And Richard, I cannot thank you enough for... coming on this journey for helping to create so many amazing games and being able to work on yet another amazing game together. Well, thank you for getting me involved. It's been a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to seeing how this exploration of this space goes.
All right. Well, as my first ever repeat guest, I think this was great to be able to deep dive into our mutual project together. And I can't wait to see what we get to talk about next time. Thanks. always good to talk about games uh especially with you just thank you so much for listening i hope you enjoyed today's podcast
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